That got your attention didn’t it.
Exxon CEO, Darren Woods, explaining novel accounting innovation Carbon Measures at COP30, gave the rationale for allocating responsibility for fossil fuel consumers, not producers.
He likened it to Macdonalds “being asked to take responsibility for the weight of their customers.” 🍔
Yes. Let’s keep the comparisons going….
💉 It would be like drug cartels taking responsibility for the addictions of users.
🗡️ Or manufacturers of zombie-killer knives taking responsibility for the use of their weapons in stabbings.
I agree 💯% it would be just like that. That’s the point.
Darren’s MacDonalds analogy is right, and so too his conclusion that “the only way that an oil and gas company … can reduce its Scope 3 emissions is to stop selling product”.
Yep. Pretty much … So start selling something else like renewable energy.
Same for drug cartels – stop cultivating drugs, and start growing food. Maybe for MacDonalds?
Zombie-killer knife manufacturers… yeah, you can just stop, actually.
Beyond the obvious responsibility-shirking, there’s a philosophical question of whether our accounting systems can ever fully capture the allocation of shared responsibilities.
Even if drug cartels followed IFRS, it still wouldn’t resolve the shared responsibility problem. (Being a recovering mathematician, I’m still fascinated by this fuzzy topic and methods like the Shapley Value – so cool*). The core responsibility of accountants is maintaining a true & fair view – which extends to reflecting on the limitations of accounting principles themselves.
The reality is that responsibility for complex and messy social and environmental challenges doesn’t follow neat double-entry bookkeeping rules.
More clarity and accuracy in individual carbon foot-printing? Great.
But using that to remove responsibility from those with a business model to create path dependency and provide a sustaining contribution? No thank you.
The real surprise isn’t Exxon coming out with this, or the likes of Blackrock supporting it, it’s the sustainable finance and accounting community taking it seriously by being sidetracked by a spurious framework flashmob with media buying power. It isn’t a complementary protocol to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol), it’s a deliberate distraction; a time-wasting display in extra-time, during the last half-decent decade we’ll have left.
Sidebar: can we stop obsessing about making everything interoperable already – especially if it means having our systems all share the same bad ideas?
When Carbon Measures first came out, I thought I’d dig into it rather than responding on instinct. On closer inspection, it’s more insidious than I thought.
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